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Here's how to negotiate, GOP-style: Begin by making outrageous demands. Bully your opponents into giving you almost all of what you want. Rather than accept the deal, add a host of radical new demands. Observe casually that you wouldn't want anything bad to happen to the hostage you've taken -- the nation's well-being. To the extent possible, look and sound like Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."

This strategy has worked so well for Republicans that it's no surprise they're using it again, this time in the unnecessary fight over what should be a routine increase in the debt ceiling. This time, however, something different is happening: President Obama seems to be channeling Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver." At a news conference last Wednesday, Obama's response to the GOP was, essentially, "You talkin' to me?"

Obama's pushing and poking are aimed at Republicans who control the House, and what he wants them to "just do" is abandon the uncompromising position that any debt-ceiling deal has to include big, painful budget cuts but not a single cent of new tax revenue.

More by Jay Cost

The budget battle that is brewing in Washington actually has three levels to it. The first is the battle over the debt ceiling, and the desire for congressional Republicans to extract as much as they can from Obama on spending cuts. The second is longer term, and involves keeping the United States out of some sort of Greek-style catastrophe. And the third involves an age-old ideological conflict that has defined the two-party system for some time: how much money should the federal government take in revenues and distribute in outlays?

Turn down the volume on the liberal hyperbole, where every Republican in Congress secretly wants to destroy Social Security, and it is not hard to discover the position of the Grand Old Party. Over the last forty years, the federal government has taken in about eighteen percent of GDP in taxes and spent about twenty percent of GDP in outlays, so why not just keep doing that?

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Oooh…those Republicans are so radical! How dare they want to tax and spend as much as the country has taxed and spent over the last half century! How on earth can we continue to fund food safety and the weather service? How will we rebuild our crumbling infrastructure? I know it's crazy, but those zany GOPers believe that the federal government can indeed find a way to meet its obligations on consumer safety, highways and transportation, social welfare, national defense, and so on without redistributing more than twenty cents of every dollar, just as it has for the last forty years.

The Democratic position is that the federal government should take in more and spend more – just how much more depends on how far to the left any given Democrat is.

Let’s keep this in mind as we now consider the projections of the Congressional Budget Office for the next eighty years.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one should make clear why the GOP is not putting tax increases on the table. The fiscal path the country is on will take us to an unprecedented level of spending and taxation. Why should the Republicans want to facilitate this process any more?It is contrary to pretty much everything the party is supposed to stand for. If anything, the GOP earns a fair share of the blame for this impending disaster because the party didn't do anything about it between 2003 and 2007, when it had full control of the government and knew full well that, thanks to the baby boomers and out-of-control medical costs, our terribly outdated Medicare system was set to blow up the budget. At least now, Republicans are no longer a party to making it worse, by demanding -- at last! -- some fiscal restraint and some sensible reforms.